Nicci French - Blue Monday

‘I’ve been there once, when his wife was away.’

Jack rummaged in his pocket and found a pen and an old receipt. He handed them across and she wrote on the back of it and returned them.

‘What’s he done?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Jack.

As he left he handed over the last ten-pound note. He wanted to apologize, though he didn’t know what for.

Jack sat opposite a man with a bald head and a waxed moustache who was reading a magazine about guns. When he had told Frieda he had actually found Alan’s mystery woman, she had insisted on meeting him at his place. Jack had feebly protested: he didn’t want her to see where he lived, particularly not in the state it had been in when he’d left this morning. He worried about which of his housemates would be there and what they might say. To make matters worse, the train back got delayed in a tunnel – passenger under a train, the announcement said. He was fumbling with his key in the lock when he saw her coming up the road. It was getting dark and she was wrapped up against the cold, but he would have recognized her anywhere, just from the way she walked, swift and upright. She was so purposeful, he thought, and a wave of exultation passed through him, because he had been successful and had something to give her.

She reached him as he was pushing open the door. The hall was full of junk mail and shoes; there was a bicycle leaning against the wall that they had to squeeze past. Loud music was coming from upstairs.

‘It might be a bit messy,’ he said.

‘That’s all right.’

‘I don’t know if there’s any milk.’

‘I don’t need milk.’

‘The boiler’s not completely working.’

‘I’m wearing warm clothes.’

‘It’s warm in the kitchen.’ But when he saw it, he backed out of it rapidly. ‘I think the living room might be more comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll plug in the radiator.’

‘It’s fine, Jack,’ said Frieda. ‘I just want to hear exactly what happened.’

‘It was unbelievable,’ said Jack.

The living room was nearly as bad as the kitchen. He saw it through Frieda’s eyes: the sofa was a horrible leather affair that someone’s parents had given them when they moved in; it had a wide rip along one arm that was disgorging white fluff. The walls were painted a vile green; there were bottles and mugs and plates and strange items of clothing everywhere. Some dead flowers stood on the windowsill. His squash bag was open in front of them, a dirty shirt and a balled pair of socks on the top of it. The anatomically correct skeleton he had had since his first term at university stood in the centre of the room hung with flashing Christmas lights, several hats piled up on its skull and some lacy knickers hanging off its long fingers. He swept the magazines off the table and covered them with a coat that was lying on the sofa. If he was in a session with Frieda, he could have told her about the chaos he lived in and how it made him feel slightly out of control of his own life as well. If it was him who read those magazines (which it wasn’t, though he had glanced surreptitiously at them every so often), he could have told her about that as well. He could have explained that he felt he was living in a limbo state, between his old university life and the world of adulthood, which always seemed to belong to other people and not to him. He could describe the mess of his soul. He just didn’t want her to see it for herself.

‘Have a seat. Sorry, let me move that.’ He took the laptop and the ketchup bottle from the chair. ‘It’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘Some of my housemates are a bit disorganized.’

‘I’ve been a student,’ Frieda said.

‘We’re not students, though,’ said Jack. ‘I’m a doctor, kind of. Greta’s an accountant, though you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘You found her.’

‘Yes,’ said Jack, brightening. ‘Can you believe it? I’d just about given up, and then suddenly there she was. It was a bit disturbing, though. It doesn’t make sense, really – and she was both the woman Alan told you about and… well, she wasn’t. Not really.’

‘From the beginning,’ Frieda commanded.

Under her concentrated gaze, Jack told her everything that had happened. He repeated the conversation with the woman word for word, as near as he could manage. At the end, there was a silence.

‘Well?’ he said.

The door opened and a face peered in. It saw Frieda and leered expressively, then withdrew. Jack flushed to the roots of his hair.

‘Dirty dog?’

‘That’s what she called Alan, except she said his name was Dean.’

‘Everything Alan said was true.’ Frieda seemed to be talking to herself. ‘All the things we thought might be inside his head were in the outside world all the time. He wasn’t making it up. But the woman – the one he said he’d never seen before – knew him.’

‘Knew this Dean Reeve,’ corrected Jack. ‘At least, that’s what she said.’

‘Why would she lie?’

‘I don’t think she was lying.’

‘She described everything the way he did, except she says it happened to someone else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he lying to us? If he is, what’s it about?’

‘She wasn’t the glamorous woman I’d been expecting,’ said Jack. He felt awkward talking about Heidi, but he wanted to tell Frieda how he’d felt, standing in the hot, sickly-sweet room, trying not to think about all the men who had trudged up the narrow stairs. He remembered her red-flecked eyes and felt slightly sick, as though it was his fault.

‘I’ve had colleagues who look after sex workers,’ said Frieda. She was looking at him as though she could see his thoughts. ‘Mainly they’re addicted, abused and poor. There’s not much that’s glamorous about it.’

‘So Alan goes to prostitutes under the name of Dean. And then he can’t bring himself to actually confess it straight out, but has to wrap it up in this strange story of his, which takes away his responsibility for it and makes her less damaged. Is that what you think?’

‘There’s one way to find out.’

‘We could go there together.’

‘I think it would be better if it was just me,’ said Frieda. ‘You did really well, Jack. I appreciate it and I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.’

He mumbled something incomprehensible. She couldn’t tell whether he was pleased by her praise or disappointed at being left behind.

Alan’s meeting with Heidi had happened near Victoria Park. The address that Jack had got was for Brewery Road in Poplar, several miles further east. Frieda took the overland train there. She stared out from the platform at the river Lea, grubby and grey, as it twisted its way in the last few curves before it spilled itself into the Thames. She turned away from it and walked past the bus station and under the huge road junction. She could feel the rumble of lorries over her. The underpass led in one direction to a superstore. She looked down at her map and turned to the right, into the residential area on the other side. This had been in the heart of the old East End, which had been flattened during the Blitz by bombs intended for the docks. Every couple of hundred yards, a few surviving houses stood defiantly among the flats and tower blocks that had been built on top of the bomb sites. These new estates were already stained and faded and crumbling. Some had bikes and flowerpots on their narrow balconies, and curtains at their windows. Others were boarded up. In one courtyard, a gang of teenagers huddled round a bonfire made of broken-up furniture.

Frieda walked slowly, trying to get a feel for the area, which had never been more than a name to her. It was a part of the city that had been forgotten and betrayed. Even the way it had been built on felt like a kind of rejection. She passed a defunct petrol station, with pits in the forecourt where pumps had once stood, and the remains of a redbrick building standing jaggedly behind. Then a row of shops, only two of which were still open – a barber’s and a shop selling fishing tackle. A wasteland where nettles grew on the cracked concrete. She passed a series of roads that had been named after western counties – Devon, Somerset, Cornwall – and another after poets: Milton, Cowper, Wordsworth.